Circuit City and Civil Rights
I just read about Michael Righi’s adventures in civil rights (via boingboing). Basically he did two things, first he refused to show the checker at the exit of the Circuit City his receipt and later he refused to show his license to a cop (that he called) - he stated his name and would have stated more, but it is not in the law that he has to show his papers.
The post is pretty interesting and I always like reading about people who have more convictions in their rights and more balls to stand up for them than I do. That is, I apparently value convenience over my civil rights more often than not - while I am pissed at the increasing war on my rights, I personally do very little to actually fight back. Sad, I know. So I am always pleased to see others doing that dirty work.
But I am of two minds on this Circuit City bit. I completely understand that he was well within his rights (I presume that he was) and I further understand that checking receipts and bags presumes your guilt and it is up to you to prove your innocence. On the other hand it seems to me that shop lifting is a real problem and that stores could design their checkout experience to make it so that this process was essentially part of the checkout, not a separate thing.
If you’ve ever been to B&H in NYC you know what I mean. You shop at various stations where you never actually handle what you’re going to buy - it all gets shipped to a bagging station right by the exit and you get a bar code identifying what you’ve bought. Then you gather up all these slips and go to a cash register where you pay, then you stand on another line to get to the bagging station and give them your slip and they hand you your bag right by the door. This is a mountain of lines to stand in, a monumental effort on the store’s part and while as efficient as it can be - is probably slower than it could be. It seems to me that by pre-inconveniencing you the customer, stores could take care of the legal issue of quickly checking your receipt as you exit, but that would be kind of a bummer as lines would slow down and maybe costs would go up. In the same way, I find stores that ask you to check your bags before entering, annoying, but I accept that they feel it’s necessary and am generally ok with it. Is that the beginning of the slippery slope? I don’t know. Perhaps I’m too complacent with my rights.
Now the not showing your license issue, that seems pretty reasonable. I don’t really understand what the police officer needed to see his id for. As he states in his post, what if he didn’t have a license or even what if he simply left his ID at home? Is that arrestable? Does that mean that we have to carry around our identification at all times or worry about facing the law? That seems fairly worrisome to me. On the other hand I would never not show a cop my ID, I just don’t have the nuts to do it.
In any event, I am hoping things turn out for Michael on both of these accounts. I suspect that things will get worse before they get better, so I’ll be keeping an eye out for the updates to that post!
